Officials who helped establish a now-shuttered private university in Squamish, B.C., are calling for a public inquiry into how it closed.
Quest University filed for creditor protection in 2020 and finally closed in 2023, just 16 years after it first opened.
The school had an unconventional model, with seminar-style classes capped at 20 students, using “blocks” rather than course credits and five divisions rather than traditional faculties.
“To exaggerate a little bit, I was a parent, I was a father of this institution and it’s like seeing one of your children abused and eventually killed, and it upsets me,” said former West Vancouver-Capilano MLA Ralph Sultan, who was instrumental in the university’s creation.
In 2002 Sultan introduced the Sea to Sky Act as a private member’s bill into the BC legislature, which led to the establishment of Quest.
Sultan is among a group of people now calling for a probe into what went wrong.
“It remains important to me that the failure of Quest be understood,” former Quest president David Helfand told Global News.
“I don’t know where any of the money came from. I was sometimes told money came from one place or another but I have no confidence in those reports”.
Quest opened in 2007, the brainchild of former UBC president David Strangway, but never managed to overcome troubled financials.
Just a year after it opened, all academics on its board were fired.
“The afternoon of knives,” said Olav Slaymaker, a UBC professor emeritus of geography and former Quest board member. Slaymaker was also a longtime friend of Strangway until he died in 2016.
“(Four board members) were given gag orders and told that the board no longer needed our presence. Clearly there was a move to clear the influence of David Strangway from the board.”
Independent researcher Vivian Krause has been digging into Quest’s brief but troubled history for years and believes there is a story to be told.
She said she’s troubled by the financial arrangements of dozens of charitable foundations connected to the university.
“Not only did these charities share the same address, most of them were directed by the same people — who were the employees of the lawyer who ran the law firm,” she said.
“One employee, for example, was the director of 75 charities.”
Ten charities linked to the university have had their status revoked by the Canada Revenue Agency, which said they “failed to devote resources to a charitable activity.”
Krause alleges that many of the charitable donations given to Quest were not actually donations at all, but loans.
Repaying those debts, she alleges, helped push the institution into bankruptcy, while the donors benefited.
“These very large tax receipts are translating into being able to avoid tax for tens of millions of dollars,” she said.
In 2023, the province and Capilano University bought Quest’s Squamish campus for $63 million.
But its undeveloped endowment lands are now owned by the university’s original benefactor, who is credited with donating $100 million to kick-start the school.
“That in itself is a scandal,” Slaymaker said.
Those who want an inquiry believe the answer to why Quest ultimately failed is buried in decades’ worth of tax returns and audits.
“The problem is the sheer complexity of the story almost defies understanding,” Sultan said. “I mean, I have three Harvard degrees.”
The group says a public inquiry is the only way to know why 1,000 graduates are alumni of an institution that no longer exists.